Tuesday, April 23, 2013

My Year In Shakespeare

Once a year, some of us, we few, we happy few — or, as my
cousin calls us, people with greasepaint in our blood — celebrate Shakespeare’s
birthday.Why celebrate the birth (and
death) date of someone who wrote over 400 years ago, is not in my family tree
by any stretch of the imagination, and is recalled as school days torture by
the majority of people I talk with every day?Because listening to and reading Shakespeare sharpens my mind and has
afforded me great pleasure over the years, as well as being the first building
block in a number of friendships that have blessed my adult life. I am grateful, more than once a year, to the
Bard and those actors/directors/teachers/friends who taught me how to take his
words in and make them mine, in particular Eric
Hoffmann and the late Robert Mooney.

The year’s wheel has come full circle, so I started writing
down all sorts of fascinating things about Shakespeare, but then I had too much
of a good thing, so I had to stiffen the sinews and start from scratch.While setting goals for next year (for which
I intend to plan ahead, just as I probably did last year for this), I’ll move
apace with this year’s musings.

Once a year my friend Horvendile posts to his blog, A Likely Story, a list
enumerating things he’s done — how many poems he’s written, how many plays, short
stories, how many pints of Guinness or bottles of wine drunk, among other
things (and thereby hangs a tale), as well as every play he’s attended.Many of the last will overlap with my list of
plays seen because we cannot get enough Shakespeare.

I come to list Shakespeare, not to praise him, the plays and
books I’ve seen and/or read that were by or about Shakespeare in the year since
I last posted to the Happy Birthday Shakespeare Blog.What would be impossible would be to list how
many of Shakespeare’s phrases I have heard in everyday conversation without
anyone realizing the debt.There are too
many to count, so that way madness lies.

Last year I blogged about the role Shakespeare played in my theatrical
experience in terms of performing and directing.I said it then and I’ll say it again:I’m no scholar or academic, and my experience
with Shakespeare is certainly neither as consistent nor as long as I would like.Still I remember learning to scan, learning
how the verse (or lack thereof) can inform an actor more than 400 years on how
to say a line, what it means, where the stresses go.This is a remarkable gift.(Or curse, when the actors strutting their
hour onstage mangle the verse, which is why it can be so rewarding to
experience the stories anew in a foreign tongue.)So although I haven’t acted Shakespeare in
some time, I continue to attend productions of his plays several times a year,
I re-read some of the plays each year and someday soon I’ll re-read the entire canon,
preferably aloud with friends.

Just before we celebrated Shakespeare’s birthday last year,
I saw the excellent SimonCallow perform Being Shakespeare which
was written by the scholar/academic I am not, Jonathan Bates.This is an
historical fabrication bent on clarifying that Will Shakespeare had education
and experience enough to have written the plays and poetry attributed to him,
and happily had a number of monologues and soliloquies included in it.This in contrast to Mark Rylance’s play, I Am Shakespeare, which I did not
see but rather read.It’s a lot of fun,
but did not convince me that anyone besides Will wrote the plays.(I still haven’t seen Anoymous.)

Will was busy, so Artie posed in a ruff. Ruff. (c) 2013 Eric Johnson Jr.

As summer 2012 dawned, I saw the NYC Public Theatre’s delightful
production of As You Like It on a perfect evening at the Delacorte in Central
Park.Droll and heartfelt,
it transported us all to joy.

In October we trekked to lower Manhattan to see a production of Hamlet
from Shakespeare’s Globe.I called it a Wee Hamlet
because of the charmingly compact set the company traveled with and the short
playing time — due to the very fast delivery of a streamlined script.

A representation of The Globe in London.

In November we journeyed to the Brooklyn Academy of Music
for an unusual production from the Netherlands — it was an all-day
affair featuring news crawls, newsreels, no intermission, however imbibing, wandering
and tweeting were allowed.This was Roman Tragedies, which is a mash of Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony
& Cleopatra, by the Toneelgroep
Amsterdam.It was close to six
hours, mostly fascinating.Oh, and it
was in Dutch.No, I do not.

In the new year, a delightful Much Ado About Nothing (by the same company that did a marvelous Taming
of the Shrew last year, Theatre For a New Audience at the Duke Theatre
in Manhattan) and most recently the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Julius Caesar at the BAM Opera House.

A few decades ago (guess the year), my friends Judy and Alan and I purchased the best bargain of our lives — New York’s Public Theatre intended to perform the entire canon of Shakespeare over the course of five years, and we paid up front what then appeared to be an enormous sum to subscribe. For that investment, we saw all of the plays at least once, with extra productions over a period that stretched beyond those original five years, including reserved seats even at the summer venue, the Delacorte! Final tally: $11 per performance. The like will never come again.

One of those friends is Alan Gordon, author of the Fools Guild Mysteries whose latest publication is an essay in the new book Living With Shakespeare, an anthology of essays by writers, actors, directors, and others edited by Susannah Carson and Harold Bloom. This book has given me hours of delight and I’m not even halfway through. The evening before Shakespeare’s birthday, the editor and several contributors chatted about the book and Shakespeare and the plays at the National Arts Club in Manhattan. An evening’s discussion among friends and strangers about Shakespeare — who could ask for more on the eve of the Bard’s birth.

Also in 2013, looking forward to (I can practically hear Carly Simon singing “Anticipation”) Joss Whedon’s “home movie” of Much Ado About Nothing due in theatres in June. Then… whatever productions at BAM or elsewhere catch my eye.

Just when there was too much time between live theatre
productions, Public Television provided the exciting Shakespeare Uncovered
series, with Jeremy Irons, David Tennant, Derek Jacobi, Trevor Nunn, Joely Richardson, and Ethan Hawke exploring the texts, the
sources, the lore of spending a life performing or directing Shakespeare.

Videos
(or DVDs, I have both) recently watched include Roman Polanski’s Macbeth with Jon Finch,Francesca Annis, and Martin
Shaw.I saw this on a high school
field trip to Manhattan
in the early 1970s.Just as the nuns
hadn’t realized that Romeo and Juliet would show some bare flesh in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film of Romeo and
Juliet (how short-sighted of them!), I don’t think they realized the witches
and Lady Mac would be naked — after all, the moors and stone castle floors of Scotland
are quite chilly….What I remember most
clearly about the trip to see Macbeth was my friend Carolyn’s nails leaving
marks on my arm when Macbeth’s head was lopped off by MacDuff.

Shakespeare inspires.

With no malice aforethought but rather this birthday blog in
mind, I’ll take note of anything Shakespearean that may come my way over the
next twelvemonth….and once again I’ll post it to the website dedicated to
bringing together people who blog and love Shakespeare and … whatever else the Happy Birthday Shakespeare bloggers do at this year’s celebration of the Bard’s Birthday.

About Me

I love books of all sorts, especially children’s books. I once worked in children’s books with no qualifications (academic) whatsoever. I learned to read on my mother’s lap, my father’s lap -- I could read long before I got to school, and have never lost the wonder, never lost the suspension of disbelief, never been literary enough to recognize the techniques that bring me to laughter or tears.
I can memorize Shakespearean soliloquies on the subway, and be scared by Stephen King. The older I get, the less analysis I’m capable of, so I’ve reverted to my purely emotional, visceral responses.
I no longer mind not being as smart as my best friend, ’cause I have my own brand of smarts. I don’t know if it’s good or bad, it just is what it is.
I intend this to be about life. Which has a beginning and an end for each of us, without a discernible middle. We can never know when we’re in middle age because we don’t know when we’re going to die. So I have never been nor will I ever be middle aged. Right?